DeepMind made the news by launching their Health division along with two early-stage projects, Streams and Hark. The former focuses on acute kidney injury, which progresses within 7 days, has multifactorial causes but is preventable in 25% of cases. The Streams app sends test results and physiological readings to physicians while on the go. Hark, on the other hand, is a clinical task manager app. Early evidence suggests that users find it more effective, efficient and less distracting than incumbent pagers.

At MWC last week, Mark Zuckerberg vouched for the proliferation of VR and the work of FB’s Connectivity Lab applying computer vision on DigitalGlobe high-res satellite imagery to inform their strategy in delivering internet connectivity to the unplugged world. Of note, the team trained deep CNNs typically used on FB photos on 8k binary labeled (does/doesn’t contain a building) satellite images from one country to analyse 21.6M square kilometers from 20 countries. This is an intriguing example of FB/GOOG/AMZN etc. encroaching on territory previously addressed by startups (e.g. Orbital Insight).

Learning functions across many orders of magnitudes, Google DeepMind. When training deep reinforcement learning models to play Atari games, significant variation in the magnitudes and frequencies of rewards between games made a priori data normalisation using domain knowledge a requirement. Here, the authors present an adaptive normalisation technique to remove this heuristic.

PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks, Google. Instead of using image retrieval techniques, the authors subdivide the Earth into a set of 26k geographical cells as the target classes and train a CNN using 126M geotagged images. The model outputs a probability distribution over the Earth representing the likelihood that the test image is located in a particular cell.

Talla, the virtual assistant focused on corporate recruiting, marketing and office management, raises a $4m seed round. The company is led by the founder of Backupify (cloud data backup), which sold to Datto for $90m.

PredictionIO, the popular open source machine learning server, was acquired by Salesforce for an undisclosed sum. The business launched in 2014, raised $2.5m and employed a team of 8.

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